Nervous System Regulation: How to Come Back from Chronic Stress

Nervous System Regulation: How to Come Back from Chronic Stress

You get everything done. That is the strange part. You answer the emails, you handle the kids, you show up to the meeting, you keep the whole thing moving. And then you walk in the door at the end of the day and something in you just goes offline. You cannot eat much. You do not want to talk to anyone. You sit on the couch for a couple of hours because the idea of cooking dinner feels genuinely impossible, and then you lie down and your body will not let you sleep even though you are exhausted. Does that sound familiar?

Here is what I want you to know before we go one sentence further. You are not lazy, and there is nothing wrong with you. What you are describing has a name, and it has a mechanism, and it is your nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do under too much pressure for too long. This is what nervous system regulation is really about, and once you can see it, a lot of things that felt like personal failings start to look like something your body is trying to tell you.

I got to talk about all of this with Liz Tenuto, who a lot of people know as The Workout Witch. Liz is a somatic exercise expert and the author of a new book called When the Body Speaks, and she has taught this work to more than two hundred thousand people. She explained the whole thing in a way that finally made it click for me, and I have been a psychologist for a long time. We are going to walk through her water-bottle model of stress, the state she calls functional freeze, and a one-minute practice you can do while you read this.

But I want to be straight with you about something first. Most of the people who come to work with my team at Growing Self have already read the articles. They know they should slow down, they know they should rest, they have heard “just breathe” a hundred times. Information was never the missing piece. The missing piece is that your body has been running the same pattern for years, and a paragraph on a screen is not going to override that on its own. What I am going to give you here is real, and it will give you language for what is happening inside you. The actual work, the part where your body learns a different way to be at 9pm on a Tuesday when everything is too much, that is the work we do with people every day. Keep that in mind as you read. This is where we are headed. If you want to talk to someone about the chronic stress you have been carrying, you can work with a therapist or coach for stress on our team whenever you are ready.

What Is Nervous System Regulation? Start with the Water Bottle

Here is the direct answer. Nervous system regulation is your body’s ability to shift out of a stress response and return to a calm, balanced state, and to do it intentionally instead of only crashing when you finally run out of fuel. The reason so many capable people lose that ability has nothing to do with willpower. It has to do with capacity.

Liz uses a water bottle to explain it, and it is the clearest picture of stress I have heard in years. Imagine your body’s capacity to handle stress is a bottle. At the bottom you have some ordinary pressure, maybe work. Then you add money worries. Then a hard relationship, or a betrayal, or a stretch of bad sleep, or just the low hum of living on a busy street with too much noise and not enough quiet. Each one pours a little more in. None of them are dramatic on their own. But they accumulate, and there is only so much room in the bottle.

When the water reaches the top and spills over, you have lost your capacity to absorb anything else. That is the moment your body flips into survival mode. And this is not a metaphor your body invented to be difficult with you. It maps onto what researchers call allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear that builds up when the stress response stays switched on over months and years rather than switching off after the threat passes.

Most people I work with can feel that their bottle is overflowing long before they can name why. That gap, between knowing something is wrong and knowing what to do when you feel overwhelmed, is exactly where a good coach or therapist becomes useful. It is genuinely hard to see your own capacity clearly from inside a life that is already too full.

Why Do I Have Physical Symptoms When My Doctor Says I’m Fine?

Because chronic stress shows up in the body, not just the mind. When you are braced against ongoing pressure, your muscles stay contracted, your sleep breaks down, and your gut stops cooperating, and none of that requires a diagnosable disease to be completely real.

Liz lived this before she understood it. For years she had insomnia she could not explain and pain that made ordinary days hard, and when she went to doctors they told her everything looked fine. She is not alone in that. She described the version so many people know: you go in convinced you have IBS because your stomach has been a mess for months, and the doctor runs the tests and tells you that you do not have IBS, and you walk out more confused than when you arrived. The symptoms are real. The mechanism is just different from the one medicine was looking for.

What is actually happening is that habitual tension from chronic stress contracts the muscles of the abdomen and the deep core, and over time that can produce the stomach trouble, the migraines, the back pain that no scan explains. This is the territory Bessel van der Kolk mapped in The Body Keeps the Score, the idea that our experiences live on in the body whether or not we are consciously tracking them. It does not mean you are broken. It means your body has been keeping score of a lot of stress.

If you have spent years being told you are fine while your body clearly disagrees, it can help to talk to someone who takes the whole picture seriously, the physical and the emotional together. That is part of why we work the way we do, and if you are not sure what kind of help fits, our team can help you figure out what kind of support you actually need.

What Is Feldenkrais, and How Does It Calm the Nervous System?

Feldenkrais is a named, credentialed somatic method built on tiny, repeated micro-movements that release habitual tension out of the body. It sits under the broader somatic umbrella alongside approaches like the Alexander Technique, and it is grounded in principles of biomechanics and how we actually move. Liz has spent fifteen years teaching it and has developed a version specifically for nervous system regulation.

When she first saw a class, she was skeptical, because it looked like a room full of people rolling around on the floor in their pajamas. What is actually going on is far more precise. You might lie on your back with your knees bent and your arms out like goalposts, and simply let the backs of your hands drift toward the floor and back up, over and over, while a teacher cues your attention. How relaxed can your belly be? How small can you make the movement? Can you feel your collarbones shift?

The part that made Liz cry after her first class was not the movement itself. It was that she was given permission to be, in her words, lazy and unambitious, to rest whenever she wanted, with no correct way to do it. For a lifelong perfectionist that was a completely new way of being in her own body. And that is the point. The practice teaches your nervous system that it is safe to stop performing and just feel.

Feldenkrais is one of those things that sounds simple on the page and is surprisingly hard to give yourself alone, especially if you have spent your whole life pushing through. The version of you reading this and the version of you at the end of a brutal week are two different people. That is not a flaw. It is a big part of why working with someone who is paying attention to your actual life makes the difference.

Functional Freeze, and How to Get Out of It

Functional freeze is a blended nervous-system state where you run on fight-or-flight all day, get everything done, and then collapse at night with nothing left in the tank. If you have ever powered through a full day and then sat frozen on the couch for hours, too depleted to cook or decide anything, that is it. The way out is not more discipline. It is teaching your body how to come down.

It helps to see the whole spectrum. On one end is fight-or-flight, what Liz calls the nervous system staying switched on. You feel wired and tired, you overschedule, you keep going, maybe you numb out in your downtime, but you never really power off. On the other end is freeze, where you feel heavy and lethargic and even simple self-care like taking a shower can feel impossible. Functional freeze lives in between, and it is the one so many high-functioning women are quietly living in. When Liz described it, I said out loud, I identify with that. She said a lot of women do.

In the middle of the spectrum is the state we are actually aiming for, what she calls the Goldilocks place, the ventral vagal state where you feel open, relaxed but not exhausted, playful, and connected to other people. This part of the map comes from polyvagal theory, Stephen Porges’s framework describing how the autonomic nervous system moves between social calm, mobilized fight-or-flight, and shutdown. It is a model rather than settled fact, and researchers still debate the finer points, but as a way to understand your own states it is genuinely useful.

Naming your state is the first move, and figuring out how to actually get out of functional freeze, in your specific life, with your specific pressures, is the next one. That is a big part of what coaching is for. It is hard to build a new pattern by yourself in the exact moments the old pattern is strongest.

How Somatic Practice Rewires Your Nervous System

Short answer: repetition. Your nervous system is, as Liz puts it, a communication highway between your brain and your body, and every time you practice a somatic exercise you are rehearsing the calm ventral vagal state. Do it enough and you build new neural pathways that make that calm state easier to reach.

Her comparison is one I keep coming back to. It is similar to weightlifting. The more you lift, the stronger the muscle gets. The more you practice these exercises, the stronger the new pathways become, until shifting out of survival mode stops being something that only happens by accident and becomes something your body knows how to do. Regardless of whether you are stuck in fight-or-flight, freeze, or functional freeze, the practice moves you toward the same balanced place.

This is also the reframe that takes the shame out of it. If your body can learn its way into survival mode through years of accumulated stress, it can learn its way back out. You are not stuck with the nervous system you have right now. It is trainable.

Reading Your Body’s Signals: The Signs of Stored Stress

The clearest way to know whether you are carrying chronic stress is to check the body directly. This is where the mind-body connection stops being an abstract idea and starts being useful. Liz rattled off a list of tells, and it is worth reading slowly, because most people recognize several at once.

• Your jaw is clenched, maybe right now as you read this.
• Your shoulders live up around your ears.
• You notice in photos that your posture is slumped.
• You have chronic back pain, or migraines more than once a month, or frequent stomachaches.
• You sleep badly even when you are exhausted — the tell that overlaps most with sleeping well being a downstream effect of regulation, not a separate project.
• You need to shut down and decompress every single evening before you can function.

That last one is the one that got me. Coming home and wanting to talk to no one, just sit and watch a show and disappear for a while, is not a personality quirk. It can be a sign that your system has been running hot all day and has nothing left. The good news hiding inside that list is that every one of these is a signal you can learn to read and respond to, instead of a verdict on who you are.

If you read that list and recognized yourself in most of it, that is worth taking seriously, and it is worth saying out loud to a real person. Our coaches and therapists work with exactly this kind of chronic stress constantly. You do not need to be in crisis to reach out. That is what a first conversation is for.

A One-Minute Somatic Exercise You Can Do Right Now

Here is the direct one, the practice you can do sitting exactly where you are. It takes about a minute, and Liz guided me through it live on the episode.

Come to the middle of your chair or sofa, feet about hip-distance apart. Take your first finger and place it between your eyebrows. Now swipe gently upward to your hairline, then lift your finger off and return to your eyebrows, and repeat. Go in one direction only, from the brows up to the hairline, lift, and come back. If your arm gets tired, rest it and pick it back up. As you keep going, notice how unclenched your jaw can be, almost as if you could let yourself drool. Let the hand resting on your leg go soft. See how relaxed your belly can be. I did not even realize I was clenching my belly until Liz pointed my attention to it.

That upward stroke stimulates a cranial nerve that connects down to the brainstem, which is heavily involved in your fight-or-flight response, and that is why it gives you a quick sense of relaxation. Liz does it in line at the store or when she is stopped in traffic. It is the kind of tool you can keep in your pocket for the rest of your life. From there, she teaches sequences of roughly five to ten minutes for deeper results, but even this one minute is a real start.

A one-minute reset is a wonderful doorway, and for a lot of people it is not the whole house. If your bottle has been overflowing for years, a single exercise will not undo that on its own, and that is not a failure on your part. It is just the difference between a tool and a practice you build with support.

Can You Regulate Your Nervous System if You Can’t Meditate?

Yes. If sitting still and emptying your mind has never worked for you, you are not doing it wrong and you are not a lost cause. You can reach the same regulated state through movement instead.

This one was personal for both of us. Liz and I both talked about being wired in a way that makes traditional meditation almost impossible, and both of us found that we can get to a calm, almost meditative state through movement when we cannot get there sitting on a cushion. If “just meditate” has always felt like advice written for someone else’s brain, movement-based practice may be the on-ramp you have been missing. This connects to something Liz said about ancient cultures using body-based ritual, qigong, communal dances, for healing long before we sat people down and told them to be still.

Somatics also tends to be the missing link for people who have already done the mental and emotional work. As Liz put it, you cannot really be out of survival mode if your body is physically still in survival mode. If you want to understand how the talking side of this fits in, it is worth reading up on what talk therapy actually does, because the two work beautifully together.

The people we work with rarely need just one thing. They need someone who can help them connect the insight and the body and the actual plan for a busy life. That is the kind of integrated, practical support our team is built around, and it is the natural next step if any of this is landing for you.

Why Reading This Article Probably Isn’t Enough

I want to be honest with you, because you deserve that more than you deserve a tidy ending. Everything Liz shared is real and it works. People use these practices and their lives change. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article believing that reading it was the work.

Here is what usually happens. You read something like this, something clicks, you feel a flicker of hope, and you make a quiet promise to try the new thing next time you are overwhelmed. Then next time comes, and your body does what it has done for years, and you find yourself frozen on the couch again wondering why nothing changed. The reason is not that you are unmotivated or broken. It is that you are trying to override a whole pattern, by yourself, in the exact moment that pattern is strongest. That is the hardest possible time to do something new, and it is nearly impossible to do alone.

What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can check in with after a hard week, who helps you recalibrate before the next one. That is what working with a coach or therapist on our team really is. Not lectures. Not generic advice. A real, ongoing relationship with someone paying attention to your life. And because we are licensed therapists who also practice evidence-based coaching psychology, you get both the depth and the forward-moving plan, whether you need to heal something or simply need a way out of survival mode.

If something here landed somewhere specific, that is your signal. You can schedule a free consultation with no pressure and no commitment, just a real conversation about what is actually going on for you and whether what we do might help. And if cost is on your mind, our work comes at a few different price points, including lower-cost sessions with skilled coaches training in our Board-Certified Coach program, so there is usually a way to start that fits your life. If growth rather than healing is what you are after, growth-focused coaching is another door into the same work.

Your body is not failing you. It is doing exactly what it evolved to do, and it can learn a new way. You do not have to figure that out by yourself.

xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby